Posts by Doctor Syntax

Oracle's Java pricing brews bitter taste, subscribers spill over to OpenJDK

Re: FALSE

Do they have to? Other, that it is, to meet some arbitrary analyst expectations? The likely result is that they shed those customers who were running a mix of Centos in development and test and RHEL in production.

BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe

Re: "blamed our own fuck-ups on a well publicised but unconnected problem"

The great dilemma - is it one that won't let you put the number in with spaces (but doesn't complain until you hit return) or the one that won't let you put it in without.

Top marks for an entry box that puts in the space automatically so you don't have to flip a coin.

Happy Sysadmin Day, the Bitlocker keys are in a bowl on top of the fridge

Shares in the company? that depends on the way the company's heading.

A brand new Cybertruck is still a Ccybertruck.

But a USB stick is always useful to have.

Boeing Starliner crew get their ISS sleepover extended

This is not a good time to remember you left the kettle on.

'A moose hit me' and other ways people damage their gizmos

Re: Just a coincidence, I'm sure

Don't you have a stock of old, slow and very grubby replacements especially for such occasions?

I suppose the dog eating the keys is a sort of meta version of eating the homework.

"You said that last week."

"Yes but it still has no keys. They did come out eventually but we didn't fancy putting them back."

However well-sighted the umpire there are always two schools of thought about any LBW decision.

Re: Dropping the phone while gardening

Keep your nuts out of the laptop. For safety, remain decently clad whilst computing.

Malware crew Stargazers Goblin used 3,000 GitHub accounts to make bank

Re: ChatGPT

Ingested? Don't discount the possibility it created them.

Study shock! AI hinders productivity and makes working worse

Re: Ah, the old one...

"my SQL query is stumbling along"

A well-crafted SQL query can stumble along for days. it's just a matter of knowing which columns aren't indexed.

"AI seems to encourage magical thinking."

I think it's more along the lines of being in top management is associated with magical thinking. I'm not too sure about which way the causality runs.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Re: For once

I don't know about your "for once" but once upon a time there was a bookie's in East Belfast that was suffering repeated armed robberies. One of our radio alarms was installed. the next robbery there was an almost instant response. The alarm was going straight to the police training centre across the road. It was the trainers who responded. To be precise it was the police firearms training centre.

How to maintain code for a century: Just add Rust

Re: Myopic UNIX View

Unlike C and Unix, Algol mainframes were not given away "for free" though.

You seem a little muddled - C and Unix are software, whatever hardware they run on, mainframes, whatever languages might be available on are hardware. it's not normal for non-mainframe hardware to be given away either. I'm bretty sure IBM doesn't give away its Z-series mainframes, not even if they're running Linux - which is available for them.

Initially it wasn't even allowed for AT&T to sell software due to the settlement of a monopoly investigation. What they did do was give away copies to Universities under extremely controlled conditions. Many of those who used those academic installations came to want to use them in their everyday work and many of those who didn't use them in that context (including myself who was already a bit long in the tooth to have had that experience) but had heard of them also wanted to use them in their everyday work. Disregarding the distribution of BSD, when it became possible for AT&T Unix to be licenced it most certainly wasn't given away "for free" (whatever your weasel quote marks might mean) - it was sold for Real Money. In fact, if SCO hadn't been so expensive it's possible Linux might never have got off the ground.

I spent a good part of my working life also earning Real Money from businesses who had most definitely paid for their Unix systems. The manglement of one of them never the less seemed to share your view of their value. That manglement's preferred platform was VAX/VMS which for years was always going to swallow our Unix systems' functionality in six month's time. I wonder how that worked out for them in the long run (the Unix systems were completing their 2nd migration to ever bigger boxes when I left).

Re: Waiting for systemd to intervene

The problem with systemd isn't the language.

Re: I am not too sure...

I can think of a few places where commercial code goes to be squeezed dry.

"One person's itch to learn and code found its salve in a project that few thought needed to be done."

On the basis that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, many will think it a project that ought not to be done. Once somebody decides to take that back off something there's always the temptation to fiddle with this or that.

As to whether, in a few decades time, coreutils will need to be available in Rust or Go or some future contender to replace C, none of us know.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

Nobody wants to pay for curation.

Re: Prediction

"which (to a greater or lesser degree) reflects associations in the human-generated training set pertinent to the query."

I think "lossy" covers it, otherwise it would shovel out the entire relevant input every time.

"The need to distinguish data generated by LLMs from other data"

Need? The more they fail to distinguish the better. The sooner the whole lot of them collapse and disappear up their own prompts the better.

Yes, it would be good if there was a means of letting humans distinguish but the long term is better served by letting them fail under their weight, even at the expense of confused humans becoming even more confused.

My flabber couldn't be more gasted.

Adobe exec likened hidden cloud subscription exit fees to 'heroin', says FTC

"Providing consistent innovation through flexible subscription plans"

When you've got to the point of providing, say 95% of what any given customer wants it's very likely that the remaining 5% will be the saem for all customers. Paying a subscription for access to further new features isn't going to be cost effective for most customers unless they get lucky because few customers will be interested in very few additional features.

How a cheap barcode scanner helped fix CrowdStrike'd Windows PCs in a flash

Re: Brilliant concept!

I didn't find a way to toggle between that and text but right click and the menu includes an "Edit barcode" option that takes you back to the dialog with the text displayed.

Re: Brilliant concept!

"Couldn't find a similar function in LibreOffice Writer"

Insert>Ole object>QR and barcode

Type/paste text into the box on the dialog pop-up, select format (QR is default), click OK.

Re: Working Smarter Not Harder

You could also get scanners which stored what they'd read and could disgorge it as a file. Great for stocktakes - climbing over racking etc scanner in hand. I used vi to massage the data files into a form fit for loading into a rather bigger database than Access.

CrowdStrike fiasco highlights growing Sino-Russian tech independence

Re: @Doctor Syntax - If Russia gets away with destroying Ukraine :o

"With the end of the USSR ..."

Same business, new management. Not even that new.

Re: If Russia gets away with destroying Ukraine :o

"Russia doesn't want to destroy Ukraine. Russia doesn't want NATO advancing up to its own borders."

Given that invading Ukraine prompted other neighbouring countries to apply for NATO membership that didn't work out well. You may well be correct in saying Russia doesn't want to detry Ukraine - it's just that its kleptocrats, having stolen as much as they can inside their own country want to steal another one and don't mind destorying it in the process.

You're not hallucinating: Generative AI is helping IBM's mainframes grow

Consulting revenue grew by two percent, which is less than IBM wants. Krishna attributed that to "factors such as interest rates and inflation impacted timing of decision making and discretionary spend" – issues that have been present all year.

He's not going to admit that consulting depends on lots of people and that at least some of them need to have long years of experience nor that IBM's core HR competence is getting rid of such expensive items.

The months and days before and after CrowdStrike's fatal Friday

Re: "Operates the way CrowdStrike does"

A more basic test it to ensure that it doesn't bork the machine on which was deployed. Was it only some subset of customers' machines that would have been affected?

I'd seen it there but never bothered to Google it. Now I don't have to. Such is the power of advertising.

Re: Sometimes it can be recovered, but not this time

What about those members of the general public who were screwees? They have accepted no EULA. They can claim to have been harmed by it. They can argue that any reasonable person would claim that the release process was so insufficient as t be negligent. The only defence Crowdstrike can offer is that they are too remote from the public as the EULA should have prevented their customers from deploying it on anything that mattered in the real world. Arguing that your product is unfit for which your customers might wish to buy it isn't a good look.

Re: So, Kurtz was at McAffee when they bugged ?

McAffee was an accident so this is just a coincidence. It will need a third time before we start to get suspicious.

Re: Just bad luck?!

Consider this: the application that actually reads the file found nothing wrong with it and applied it. They now say they did apply some QA testing which also found nothing wrong with it. What's the chances that they didn't simply re-use whatever code that the application has to do the pre-release QA?

That's all very well providing that code in question is completely effective but come the day that something nasty, however unintentional the nastiness can slip past it there's nothing in the way between generating the code and borking the end-points.

Philadelphia tree trimmers fail to nip FTC noncompete ban in the bud

Re: Josh Robbins of libertarian law group

Yet again "Yes Minister" comes to your aid. It's called "getting rid of the difficult bit in the title".

Uncle Sam opens probe into CrowdStrike turbulence at Delta Air Lines

I'm sure their operational staff numbers will be rightsized.

Windows Patch Tuesday update might send a user to the BitLocker recovery screen

But how often has Microsoft been pushed on negligence?

I can envisage Crowdstrike being subject to class actions on this, not necessarily by customers but by members of the public who were frustrated airline passengers, bank customers & so on. They have no EULA with Croudstrike. What's not there can't be hidden behind but if they can establish that the company had a duty of care to them and that its release process fell short of what a reasonable person would expect then things could get interesting. Imagine Croudstrike going to court to argue that its customers shouldn't have used the product.

Administrators have update lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike outage

Re: Gross Negligence

The terms vary in different jurisdictions, but,yes, neglicence must be arguable here and those arguing it might not simply be the owners of the systems that were affected but airline passengers, bank customers and so forth.

Not necessarily all. But there's a a fate awaiting those corporations that do take that line.

When the software itself reaches out and installs the updates as they become available with absolutely no user control there is no easy way of creating that situation for customers even if money is available. The nearest you could get would be to block the update addresses on the production firewall, open them briefly every few hours if the unblocked test box is OK and hope that a bad update isn't released during that period.

Actually this does prompt a sort of mitigation. Partition the production network with only some fraction being allowed access to the update addresses at any one time - and remember that even in the panic of one partition being hit by a bad update someone has to close down the process that's going to allow the next partitions to get access.

There's something wrong with a situation where such things even have to be considered.

'Data embassies' promise bubbles of digital sovereignty, but India just cooled on the idea

"Suggesting data embassies rely on commercial cloud providers also means those orgs can profit. Which may be why Google is keen on the idea."

I wouldn't have thought it would have been possible for any US owned cop oration to participate. Luxembourg night grant embassy rights to a data cente run by Google or any other US corporation but unless the US also does so the data centre would be at the mercy of the CLOUD Act.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Re: Canary releases?

The term's been around for a while, if not in relation to releases, in other contexts. About 10 years ago it became a practice fo post assurances that a business had not been serves a subpoena by a given date. Failure to update it was an indication that it had received one without breaching any terms the subpoena may have contained forbidding an announcement that it had. The origin, of course, is a comparison with the coal-miner's canary which would be more susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning than the miner - not a close analogy with the warrant canary but it fits well with a sacrificial S/W instance which can be exposed to a pending update.

Sam Altman's basic income experiment finds that money can indeed buy happiness

"the additional $1,000 per month alone may not be sufficient to overcome the larger systemic barriers to healthcare access and reduce health disparities."

Part of this may be that health is a long term concern. Better access in mid-life may not be able to make up for earlier poorer healthcare in childhood and sustained better health care might show an effect later in life.

Meta's mass layoff severance agreements illegal, says judge

Re: Thats how

I'm sure it's the CEOs who set the corporate levels of sociopathy.

"Because if it turns out they missed one, or another one arrives"

Of course. But the sensible way to deal with this is to round the number sensibly and say "about" or "above". Don't state it to a degree of precision you aren't confident you've achieved. "About 7,510" gives a sense of the scale of what they're talking about without looking silly on the one hand, or being caught out on the other.

"According to the NLRB, approximately 7,511"

Why don't they stop messing about and give precise numbers?

Now as many as 10,000 SAP jobs to be hit by restructure

Re: focus on costs

I think the real problem isn't the shareholders but analysts who come up with short-term "expectations" (i.e. invent arbitrary targets) or require businesses to establish their own targets and then cause the share price to soar or plummet wildly depending on how the results match the target.

The best thing to do would be to take some of the analysts' toys away. Forbid the publication, except for emergency situations, of results at less than annual intervals. Require businesses to set turnover targets for a couple of years or more ahead. That would encourage longer term thinking and discourage cutting costs to maintain profits in the short term at the expense of long term viability.

Tencent Cloud launches CentOS variant tuned for Chinese silicon

Re: Do they know it's 2024?

CentOS is FOSS. It can be forked. If someone is prepared to fork a project and maintain it the fork is still alive. The status of the original is of no relevance to the fork..

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Marketshare issue is the root cause of scale of problem, and solution.

Getting governments together to do this is going to take forever.

What would be more effective would be for a number of large customers get together and devise their own T&Cs including things such as no weasel clauses to evade liability, effective testing before release, no telemetry of customer data, acceptance of unannounced spot checks to ensure that the conditions are being adhered to etc. Failure to accept them would shut a vendor out of a large segment of the market. Tag it with the "infrastructure security" label and that segment would quickly include a lot of the government market as governments are starting to realise that infrastructure security matters.

Vendors would react in different ways but those doing so prioritising their engineering departments over PR, marketing, legal, lobbying and beancounting would gain a first-mover advantage.

Re: Crap!

"Cloudstrike were gaming the system, effectively sneaking in uncertified code. The certified code that this patch ran in had no mechanism to test for even an obvious defect, and it seems accepted a patch without any kind of embedded checksum."

Now that it's known this happens I'm sure every malware author out there is looking at the possibility of getting the Crowdstrike driver to accept their code.

Re: Wrong question

There's going to be a lot of examination to determine what laws can be applied and exactly what hey allow.

Crowdstrike had been allowed to label their driver as absolutely required for boot. Once installed the system may not be able to make value judgements. Whoever allowed it to be so labelled could and should have made such judgements.